This is the fourth entry in a blogging carnival that Doug Rocks-Macqueen, of Doug’s Archaeology, started back in November last year. Just another quick recap: the whole idea of this blog carnival was started by Doug after he saw that the Society for American Archaeology are having their 79th annual conference in Austin, Texas, next month (just shy of the SXSW festival). Doug specifically noticed that they are including a session on the rise of blogging in archaeology and, since he cannot be there himself, he thought it was pertinent to start a blogging carnival online to get the archaeology blogosphere alive with monthly questions. The questions are posted on his site in the first week of each month.
Displaying the slightly softer anatomy of the human body with the skeletal tissue in this months blog banner. (Image credit, remixed with MS Paint).
Last month a total of over 50 amazing bloggers joined in answering the December topic of the Best and Worst of blogging archaeology. This is an awesome number of people involved in spreading the word about the joys and sorrows of blogging about archaeology. My entry for January can be read here. Remember that if you are a blogger writing and posting about archaeology and you want to take part then go right ahead! Feel free to join at any point, answering the past questions is very much encouraged. The previous past few months questions can be found here, please do jump in and join us!
This month (although I realise it is already March and not quite February any more) Doug has decided to do something a little bit different. This time it is up to us bloggers to choose our own topic to discuss. As I have cunningly already missed the deadline for this entry you can also go ahead and read other peoples entries here.
What Does It All Mean?
Well first let me define that for you. What does it all mean is a question I often find myself asking when I look at my blog, when I think about the hours I have spent researching and writing posts. But let’s take a minute to think how we got here in the first place.
I am writing this now on a free service that is hosting words and images that I post, and you are now reading this for free. I do not get paid in any way to produce this content (although I could in a small way I don’t think I will), and I do it of my own free volition. You decide in roughly ten seconds or so whether you will stay and read any articles that I have produced, or if you will click off the site and go on to search for something else instead. We often have multiple browsing windows open at once: currently I am watching an episode of the Flight of the Conchords as I type this post, while open in other windows I am logged into a social networking site, one of my email accounts and I also have open a few news articles ready to digest. For good measure I further have a program lined up and ready to watch on the BBC Iplayer as well.
The world-wide web, as we know it, is a grand 25 years old this year. There is a pretty astounding 2.3 billion pages on the surface web at the current time, although no one really knows how many pages or sites there are on the web as a whole, or are on the deep web in total (Naughton 2014). The deep web is, largely, only accessible when using certain pieces of software to access it (Tor, for example) and it is full of sites that are not indexed by any search engine. It is also often, but not always, used for nefarious practices. By far the biggest engine browser is Google, a powerful broker in how the internet is interacted with, and how it is indexed and searched. Every once in a while it re-configures its search algorithms to disrupt any sites that try to play the search engine optimisation game (by setting up dummy sites with links towards a selling site, for example). This can sometimes permanently disrupt a normally regular flow of visitors to online businesses and entrepreneurs (and, dare I say it, blogs as well) (Naughton 2014).
The blogging platform that this site uses is called WordPress, a self hosting blogging site which was created in 2003. Wordpress is a free open source blogging tool which supports and boasts some 60 million+ sites on the web today and is host to a very active community (read more here). It is a peer supported and fully customize-able platform where help is often provided by other users. Alongside this there is the wordpress.org site, which acts as a primary support network. Wordpress can, if it feels it necessary, shut down your blog instantly with little to no warning (largely due to backlinks, so be careful of this). This though, to the best of my knowledge, rarely happens although all users of WordPress or other such hosting sites should read carefully the terms and conditions of the service that they are signing up for. (And also make copies of posts if you want to have them stored safely elsewhere). It has been stated that WordPress is perhaps vulnerable to SQL injection attacks, though security is regularly updated .
The quick figures above are a snapshot of the current time and a very short chronology of how young this technology is. Although I have raised my concerns about the long-term staying power of blogs before, there are plenty of efforts ongoing that are helping to actively archive the websites that litter the internet. The maxim ‘blog often’ also seems to hold weight for long term bloggers. The utterly beguiling Wayback Machine has managed to archive an incredible 398 billion web pages over the current period of the webs life. Quite wonderfully this has included 20 ‘snapshots’ of this blog. Much like WordPress itself with its active community, the internet archive site mentioned above works with a large volunteer community to help store and archive digital cultural artefacts from across the web in a repository of knowledge.
At this point all of this somewhat randomly asserted bits of information may seem trivial, but I hope to show that the internet is, largely, a community of like-minded people who seek to strive to learn from each other. As such the interface between the internet, knowledge and academia (particularly archaeology blogging) is something that I think about fairly often. Also as a blogger I know that we (that is, in this instance, archaeology bloggers) are all vying for the attention of an audience that has the broadest possible range of distractions at their fingertips. A key thing to remember here of course is the fact that the majority of bloggers write because they want to write.
Digital Witnesses
But the question remains: what does it all mean to me? I have partly answered this question on a personal level before (here), but I think this question can be approached again from a different angle with help from a few friends.
This blog first took digital form in 2011 and has since been regularly updated with short and some not so short posts (to a degree). What was the urge to start publicly writing (for it is deeply public, no matter if you get 1 view or 1 million)? In part, and at large still, it was to improve my own knowledge. To make myself sit down and take stock of what I know, what I thought I knew and what I definitely didn’t know but thought I maybe knew (to paraphrase Rumsfeld). Of course it soon became more than that, primarily because I became part of an active online community. This, I believe, is vital as a part of blogging generally, a dynamic that can vitalise the blogger to change, adapt and evolve during the course of their own work. Related to this is Tim Berners-Lee’s original and sustained idea that to have a great open online expanse where it is not who shouts the loudest that counts but having the freedom to shout at all that really matters, to have that utter online freedom to take part in something.
“What’s the point of even sleeping, if I can’t show it if you can’t see me, What’s the point of doing anything?”
Digital Witness, by St. Vincent.
As such shouldn’t we take this opportunity to present our own voices, our own knowledge and our own experiences of who we are, what we do and why we do it? Could we, in effect, ignore the call of public interaction when it could offer so much?
In my own view now is the time that will test for future generations what direction the world-wide web will ultimately head in and in what direction. Will it retain its original liberty, freedom and privacy? Or will it be slowly squeezed of its freedom of use? Yet this is perhaps too simple a view of a very complex and amorphous question, after all you can have different webs, different connections and different servers (or you know, send a letter). There are always ways and there are always means to communicate. The web just happens to be able to reach a lot of people awfully fast.
Personal Academia
By personal academia I mean an ongoing independent interaction with education and interaction in a field of study, specifically in this case in the realms of archaeology, human osteology and human evolution. Because at the end of the day that is what this is, for both you and me. However I think it is also pertinent to take a brief look at the context of this blog, because context in archaeology plays a decidedly vital part of our interpretation of the material evidence. (As a side note it is always worth remembering that although a blog isn’t a physical object that one can handle it does rely on servers, which eat up both physical space and energy).
So lets take a quick case study to highlight just how blogging and academia can fit together.
Recently my blog was mentioned by name in an article by Stojanowski & Duncan (2014) who examined public engagement in bioarchaeology in the American Journal of Human Biology. The authors briefly examined the rise and history of bioarchaeology as a field, and then moved onto discussing popular topics discussed in the public outreach of bioarchaeology. Importantly they highlight that bioarchaeology is, like blogging, a young and developing field. However blogging itself came in from some criticism as the authors believed that bioarchaeology bloggers represented the “perspectives of insiders writing largely (we would argue) for other specialists and students” (Stojanowski & Duncan 2014: 5). Stojanowski & Duncan also asserted that “despite this professional vibrancy, it is clear that bioarchaeologists are (to some degree) marginalizing themselves from public discourse because popular presentations of their work are not representative of the field as a whole” (2014: 6).
The first instance that I had heard that my blog had been mentioned in the article was through a message from Alison Atken, of Deathsplanation, on a social media site. There was a second when I logged onto Kristina Killgrove’s site, Powered By Osteons, and read her article on the value in response to Stojanowski & Duncan. This discussed detailed examples that her blog had on the public’s perception of bioarchaeology and examples of her own outreach, whilst lambasting the article authors about their negation of the effects of blogging archaeology. At this point you could consider me intrigued and amazed that my blog had been mentioned by name in an academic article (although annoyed it was negatively framed).
I couldn’t personally access the article at the time though, which was published in the American Journal of Human Biology, because it is pay-walled as the majority of academic journal articles tend to be. (Although the list of open access publishers in archaeology is growing). So I emailed Kristina Killgrove to see if I could get a copy of the article. Wonderfully she duly replied and I managed to read an article referencing my own site, but which failed to actually name the people behind the blogging sites despite being a fairly prolific.
At this point I wrote my own quick reply (here). At this junction the wonderful Bodies and Academia blog highlighted to me in the comment section that the second author, Duncan, had made the article publicly available on academia. I also became aware of the recently released Meyers & Killgrove’s (2014) article in the Society for Archaeological Sciences Bulletin on bioarchaeology outreach. Although not directly in response to Stojanowski & Duncan’s article, Meyers & Killgrove (2014) highlighted the value of blogging and possible future directions, which included the greater use of video and audio resources. The article was similar to Rakita’s (2011) article in the same publication, espousing the use of social media and blogging as an educational force of outreach for good.
Alexandra Ion, over at Bodies and Academia, in response to Doug’s question of the month for February discussed the gap between academic and blog writing in regards to the above mentioned Human Biology article and the various blogging responses to it.
As the Bodies and Academia post by Ion highlights:
“This also highlighted the gap that exists, in most cases, between those involved in ‘real academic’ work and the ones doing the popular science stuff, often through blogging. More precisely,’real’ science is still associated with the classic means of communication journal articles, intended for one’s peers, while ‘popular’ science is associated with the more modern means of communication, like blogging, media etc” (from here).
This is an interesting comment and one that has riled the academic community for some time. Many academic bloggers used either hide their blogs or do not mention to their supervisors or departments their blogs. It has been well documented that some bloggers in the commercial archaeological sector have even lost their job over blogging exploits. The tide though, I feel at least with academic blogging (if we must label ourselves as such), is turning.
Kristina Killgrove will be arguing in her tenure case that her expansive blog provides an important means of education outreach, as will Katy Meyers, of the ever popular Bones Don’t Lie, during the course of her PhD studies. Scott Haddow, of A Bone to Pick, has some fantastic posts on what it is like to work in the (bioarch) field, and highlights some very interesting burials at the legendary prehistoric site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. Scott is also a great photographer and his shots of field life make me itch to get back in a trench (though I’ve no idea when that will be). Jess Beck, over at Bone Broke, has an excellent blog discussing various anatomical and physiological aspects involved in bioarchaeology research. In particular I enjoy reading her summaries of the Evolution and Human Adaptation lectures that she has attended, and her posts on human physiological adaptation.
Jamie Kendrick, a recent graduate of the MSc in Palaeoanthropology at the University of Sheffield, has a blog called The Human Story which discusses various aspects of human evolution. He asks some of the bigger questions that archaeology and palaeoanthropology can offer such as who are we? Where did we come from? What changes happened along the way? We round off this part with two other Sheffield bloggers, namely Alison Atkin of Deathsplanation and Alexandra Ion of Bodies and Academia, who share a similar focus in discussing the attitudes to the human body, archaeology and death. Both tackle subjects that surround the periphery of academia and mainstream topics.
If the above examples are not examples of public digital outreach, then I am not entirely sure what is.
Is This Social?
Navigating my post post-graduate life (before a fabled PhD, if that is the path I am to tread) I quite often feel like a ship without a rudder, nor destination in mind. Simply put I am my own and online I am this, in this guise (this is an important caveat). Through this blog then I am anchored to a greater whole, partly though my own choosing and partly through lumping. I’ve positioned this blog as a starter, a prompt into the world of human osteology and bioarchaeology. It is still a journey I am travelling and I am happy to have you along for the ride if you care to join. Could this, then, be considered social anthropology as well? Possibly a social anthropology of me, a reflection of the self? Before we get to metaphysical here let me just say that if this is a blog detailing my own dalliance in bioarchaeology, the core underpinning must always be how I position myself to those around me and how I interact with them. I recognise that I manage to get a fair few views (although not every blog is open to discussing statistics) as such I feel that I should highlight other blogs of note. This is just a personal view.
“Cause we’re all sons of someone’s, we’re all sons of someone’s, I wanna mean more than I mean to you”
Prince Johnny, by St. Vincent.
Another aspect should probably be mentioned here. Blogging, or any social media interaction, is profoundly personal yet it is also a two-way mirror. What you think you may get out of it, the reader may get something else out of it. Generally the blogger is in control of the personal information that they write and distribute online. It is up to the writer themselves then how much, or to what scale, that they do this. It can be easy to get carried away. Many of my blog entries mention the fact that I have a bone disease, I do this because the disease is little known outside of the medical world or of people who are diagnosed with it. Thus my blog, as well as the more academia archaeology/osteology, has a profoundly personal aspect to it yet I am inherently aware of the danger of exposing myself too much online. For a long time I did not have my name displayed on the blog and it is only recently that I added it again to assert ownership of the content of this blog (via Creative Commons). As for contact it is again only recently that I set up a dedicated email contact. The blog isn’t linked to a social media account in any way nor it is linked to an academic profile. Far too many social media sites are advertisements, I do not want to become an advert.
The drawbacks of this are the fact that the blog may, or may not, have been overlooked by researchers looking to critically assess the ‘health’ of academic archaeology blogging. The flipside of this is that this may mean it appeals to a broader audience, an audience which is not immediately intimidated by the academic overtone on first view. This is an assumption however and should be treated as such. I also hope that it invigorates a person to email me and think about what they are going to say (1) – there isn’t the instant backlash of social media.
In effect then the site becomes my own personal academic environment, the above blogs often highlighting to me new research, studies and popular pieces. The refrain that bounces around my head becomes not ‘what does it all mean?’ but ‘this is what it means’, that I belong to an online community where I know that my work (or at least some bits of it) are appreciated by both my peers and by a lay audience, especially in an arena where (for now) I know I lack a voice. To become a part of the vanguard of the online bioarchaeological world. To make others appreciate the great, good and real value of archaeology and the stories that are oft hidden in bone. To know the value of your own body.
The final blogging carnival question is already up at Doug’s Archaeology for April 2014 and it is about the future of blogging, so please do jump aboard and join in! The summary of this month’s questions are available at Doug’s site together with links to all the wonderful bloggers who took part.
Notes
(1). Please note that although I am not active on certain social media sites I always happy to answer any and all questions, and I am happy to take part in questionnaires, interviews or offer views on archaeology and human osteology. Contact thesebonesofmine at hotmail.com.
P.S. If you have made it this far, congratulations!
Bibliography
Meyers, K. & Killgrove, K. 2014. Bioarchaeology. Society for Archaeological Sciences Bulletin. 37 (1): 23-25. (Open access).
Naughton, J. 2014. 25 things you might not know about the web on its 25th birthday. The Guardian. Accessed 09/03/14.
Rakita, G. 2011. Bioarchaeology. Society for Archaeological Sciences Bulletin. 34 (4): 27-28. (Open Access).
Stojanowski, C. & Duncan, W. 2014. Engaging Bodies in the Public Imagination: Bioarchaeology as Social Science, Science, and Humanities. American Journal of Human Biology. In Press. (Open access on Academia.edu).
St. Vincent. 2014. Produced by John Congleton. St. Vincent. Republic Records. [Music CD].
These Bones Of Mine 